Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Nos Grape

I'm interested in Nos' idea to create a flavor such as grape, sure it's odd but it may just be good. Nos does a great job at making an energy drink, such as the regular, but I'm curious to know if this grape flavored energy drink will be just as good, if not better. Grape in a liquid form tends to be quite bitter, more than sweet, but with only 27g of sugar per serving, I'm not too sure how sweet It'll be. I'm going to assume it's not going to be sweet, but the grape flavoring may give it some more sweetness and the HFCS will tone the flavor down a bit. The bottle design is pretty simple, it's shaped like a nitrous bottle used for speeding up your race car and the cap has a removable novelty twist over it. The bottle is blue with a purple sticker over it containing racing themed fonts and designs. It has hazard/fire signs, standard factory fonts making it look 'professional', if you will. You can't look at bottle and not see 'Nos' printed in a large white font with part of the 'N' hanging of the 'O' and the 'S'. Being that the original Nos was exquisite, I'm expecting quite a lot from Nos now and I hope I can find a good taste and kick with this gassed up bottle. Let's roll.

I twist off the cool novelty nitrous oxide gas cap as well as the regular plastic bottle cap and receive sharp bitter grape aroma, not what I expected and threw me off just a bit. The color is similar to cough syrup being a cloudy purple color, with a bit of crystal color in some areas and a decent amount of fizziness. Now the taste is where it really gets odd. It seems to be if someone mixed in a whole lot of cough syrup, mixed in a small amount of sugar, as well as some carbonated water. The flavor in general is pretty bitter, hard to drink, and just not sweet enough for someone like me to enjoy. I'm disappointed, Nos had such a great flavor and now they come out with a lame Grape flavor that frankly tastes almost exactly like cough syrup. I guess it's the amount of sugar, which should be more, I think. The aftertaste isn't much, but it's more of a bitter grape taste from the primary flavor when you first take a sip. I mentioned earlier that it doesn't have too much fizziness, and it's not really that carbonated, all the shorter it'll take for me to drink it down. It has HFCS, but that doesn't automatically mean it's gummy. Nos Grape has the smallest amount of gumminess, hardly even noticeable if you're just taking sips. Overall, Nos really disappointed me with this drink, and I do recommend you stick the regular Nos if you had to choose between Nos drinks.

The ingredients are carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, citric acid, taurine, natural and artificial flavors, sodium citrate, L-Carnitine, caffeine, sodium hexametaphosphate, pectin, inositol, monopotassium phosphate, ginseng, and Sucralose. Well, the HFCS had a part in this drink by making it duller than it already is. There's sodium hexametaphosphate, which is found in cosmeticss, there's pectin which thickens the drink, and there's good ol' Sucralose. So, I can conclude that the taste was pretty dull due to the HFCS, and on top of that, it was pretty artificial from the Sucralose. Per 22 ounce bottle, you get 2750mg of taurine, 550mg of L-Carnitine, 343mg of caffeine, 274mg of inositol, and 136mg of panax ginseng. Woah, that's a whole lot of energy ingredients. The caffeine amount ranks up there with the Jolts, which brought a pretty amazing kick. Right now the kick is sufficient, but I don't have that same feeling I get when I drink a Jolt. As for nutrition facts, you get about 300 calories, and about 75g of sugar, not bad for such a big drink, but still not good generally speaking. All in all, it got a bit sweeter towards the end of the bottle, but it still really is a strong drink, perhaps too strong for me.Taste: 6.9 - A dull drink was taken over by a bitter grape flavorKick: 8.7 - I have to admit, the kick was pretty dang goodOverall: 7.4 - I'd stay away, even though the kick is good, I know you can find a better drink

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Reviewers

Jeffery "Jeff," Chandler "Chan"

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